Film director of Serbian origin, Emir Kusturica is one of the few filmmakers in the world to have won two Palme d’Or awards at the Cannes Film Festival. With his baroque, unruly universe infused with satire, he embodies a distinctive vision of Yugoslav cinema: an art of excess, carnivalesque tragedy, and politically engaged burlesque expression. His career has made him an unexpected bridge between the Balkans and Western Europe.
1985: "When Father Was Away On Business“, Childhood in the Heart of Totalitarianism
International recognition came in 1985 with the film When Father Was Away on Business (Otac na službenom putu), a work based on a screenplay by writer Abdulah Sidran. The film immerses itself in 1950s Yugoslavia, during the Tito era, where a man is sent to a labor camp after criticizing the regime. The story is told through the eyes of his son, a child who is at once naive and observant, and who becomes a quiet witness to political repression.
Through this child’s perspective, Kusturica approaches dictatorship with remarkable subtlety, free of ideological heaviness, blending emotion with critical distance. The jury of the Cannes Film Festival, then chaired by Miloš Forman, awarded it the Palme d’Or. Deeply Yugoslav in its cultural context, the film simultaneously achieves universality.
1995: "Underground“, War As a Tragic Farce
Ten years later, in 1995, Kusturica returned to Cannes with an ambitious project: Underground. The film follows, through the surreal adventures of two friends, fifty years of Yugoslav history, from the Second World War to the bloody conflicts of the 1990s.
A baroque and sprawling work, on the edge of chaos, Underground is at once a historical chronicle and a sharp political fable. Set to the explosive music of Goran Bregović, the film blends absurdity and epic grandeur, provoking both admiration and controversy, particularly for its provocative reading of recent history. Despite the debates, the Cannes jury awarded it a second Palme d’Or. Kusturica thus became a cultural figure of former Yugoslavia, at the heart of post-war identity tensions.
After Kusturica: Serbian Cinema Between Resistance and Renewal
Although Kusturica remains the most internationally recognized figure of Serbian cinema in Cannes, other directors have continued to bring Balkan reality to the global stage.
- Želimir Žilnik, a pioneer of the “Black Wave” movement, has been developing since the 1960s a radical form of documentary filmmaking that explores the social and political margins of Yugoslavia.
- Srđan Dragojević, with Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996), offers a provocative and direct portrayal of the Bosnian war, blending black humor with sharp social critique.
- Directors such as Stefan Arsenijević and Bojan Vuletić, representatives of the New Serbian Cinema, regularly participate in European festivals. Their contemporary works, often marked by absurdity, disillusionment, and social critique, testify to a deep lucidity.
Although their presence in Cannes is more discreet, these filmmakers continue the tradition of demanding cinema, rooted in reality and far from stereotypes.
Creation Between Memory and Politics
Sources:
https://www.festival-cannes.com/
Photo: Par Victor Dmitriev — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7430935